1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a dome switch assembly system. More particularly, this invention concerns the manufacture of a dome switch sub-assembly having a retaining cover, a spacer layer encompassing a plurality of dome switches, and a release liner. Even further, this invention concerns the manufacture of a complete dome switch assembly having a circuit board, spacer layer encompassing a plurality of dome switches, a retaining cover layer, and an overlay layer.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Typically, dome switch assemblies or tactile dome switch arrays are utilized to allow a user to manually input data into an electrical device. Generally, such tactile arrays are in the form of a keyboard or touchpad having certain alpha, numerical, or other designations corresponding to a particular area on the tactile array. Upon the user manually pressing these particular areas, dome switches in the array are pressed against a circuit board, thereby allowing an electrical signal to pass and thus be acted upon by the internal processing system of the electrical device.
Generally, dome switch assemblies consist of the following layers: a circuit board layer, a spacer layer, metal domes, a retaining cover layer, and an overlay layer. Typically, each dome switch assembly is individually assembled by hand, resulting in increased manufacturing costs due to the required manual labor. It is also well known in the art to provide dome switches which are sandwiched between a retaining cover and a release liner wherein the domes are situated on the retaining cover according to the configuration of the circuit board as provided by the customer. A common problem with this method is that the domes tend to migrate in the space between the retaining cover and the release liner, resulting in delays and increased cost to manually reposition the dome switches so as to conform to the circuit board layout. Thus there exists a need for a dome switch system that can be automatically assembled and which will solve the problems encountered by the prior art.